Restoring the Irreducible: Care, Dignity, and the Limits of Institutional Support in Detroit’s Homelessness

Abstract

This thesis examines how care is practiced, produced, and constrained within the Mercy Center, a Catholic-based Day Center that serves individuals experiencing homelessness in Detroit, Michigan. I explore how care and dignity are defined vis-à-vis a population rendered invisible by structural neglect by focusing on the daily interpersonal interactions and institutional frameworks that constitute this space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I center the perspectives of three groups: unhoused guests, staff members, and volunteers. Through participant-observation, I rotate between various volunteer stations such as food service, laundry, and the front distribution desk to show how dignity emerges amidst the social abandonment that necessitates the center’s very existence. This fieldwork excavates how care is a response, refusal, and product of structural neglect, exposing how the possibilities and new imaginations of care are constrained by the same institution they seek to address. My ethnography traces four key ways care and dignity take shape within the St. Mercy Center. First, it explores how guests define care through relational presence. Second, it highlights how staff and volunteers make sense of the care they provide, revealing how institutional and interpersonal forms of care are not separate from each other. Third, it analyzes how gender mediates the experience and accessibility of dignity, demonstrating the ways in which care is not experienced the same for all guests. Fourth, it interrogates prevailing definitions of surveillance by showing how being watched can function not only as a disciplinary mechanism but also can serve as a practice of recognition. This thesis poses a central question: what does it mean to restore dignity that has been systematically taken away, and whose responsibility is it to respond? Keywords: care, dignity, social neglect, structural violence, gender, surveillance, recognition